Amy Inspired

by Bethany Pierce

23

  Monday I returned to Copenhagen. I spent the entire day in my pajamas eating cereal for breakfast and lunch, sleeping off the emotional upheaval of the last two weeks. By evening I was wide awake and restless. I got dressed, grabbed To Kill a Mockingbird, and locked the apartment behind me. The insects were loud, their invisible metropolis hustling in the trees. Downtown Copenhagen was all but abandoned. Occasionally a car passed. In the sandwich shops and liquor stores the cashiers leaned against their counters reading magazines, not expecting interruption. The entire town had the empty feeling of a house just cleaned from a long, overdrawn party: The crowds were dispersed, the beer bottles thrown out, and the hosts glad of a long-awaited, quiet sleep.

  I walked the empty streets to The Brewery. A young man sat in the back corner writing on his laptop. Two older women were talking on the couch beside the front window. I took a seat at the bar. I didn’t recognize the barista who made my drink and was glad I didn’t have to talk to any of Zoë’s friends about how she was doing. Slowly, Harper Lee and the mocha worked their magic. I was tucked away in Alabama, pocketing treasures from a tree with Scout, when a hand bumped mine, startling me back to reality.

  Eli stood behind the counter. He was wiping down the bar with a wet rag, the rag he’d collided with my hand. I was more than a little surprised to see him—I’d been keeping track of his schedule, strategically avoiding the café while he was working. And he wasn’t supposed to work nights.

  “What are you reading?” he asked.

  I showed him the cover.

  “I read that in high school,” he said.

  “Me, too.”

  “You’re reading it again?”

  “I read it every year.”

  He walked to the other end of the counter, dragging the wet rag behind. “To be honest, I never finished it.”

  “Well.” I opened my book up again. “Maybe we can still be friends.”

  He grinned, his eyes on the counter where a spot of spilled coffee kept him momentarily busy.

  I read two pages without remembering a word.

  Within the hour the other customers began to leave. I debated whether to follow suit. I didn’t want it to seem as though I’d come to see Eli on purpose; I didn’t want him to think I was avoiding him either (even though I had been, for weeks). After standing at the door in a moment of indecision, I went back to the office to say good-bye.

  He sat at the desk, the blue light of the computer screen highlighting the hollow of his cheeks.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hi.”

  “Finish your book?”

  “I can’t seem to concentrate.”

  He gestured to the calendar on the wall. “Zoë’s on the work schedule,” he said.

  “I know.” I ventured over, took a seat beside him. “She’s planning to come home next week.”

  “How is she?”

  “As well as can be expected.” I paused. “So you’re here for the summer?” I asked conversationally. Hoping.

  “Uh, no, actually—” He glanced at me, then quickly looked back to the computer, minimizing windows on the screen. “I’ve been accepted to the Pendleton Artist Residency—upstate New York. I leave Friday.”

  He brought up the website, began flipping through a number of photographs, studios, galleries, paintings. But New York? I was so disappointed by his news I overcompensated. When he asked what I was doing for the summer I announced I had no plans with such enthusiasm it was almost grating in my own ears. “They don’t need any more adjuncts for the summer so I’m essentially on vacation with my students. Which would be splendid except for that little problem of money.”

  “Maybe they’d hire you here—they’ll need to fill my spot.”

  “I could never work here,” I said. “I need somewhere to sit and think that’s not my desk.”

  There was an uncomfortable pause. I said I should get going.

  “I’ll let you out.”

  The chairs had been stacked while we spoke, the lights in the coolers switched off. Outside, the streets were just as abandoned.

  “I told Jillian the truth,” he said. “I wanted you to know.”

  “How did that go?”

  His expression said enough.

  “Eli, I’m so sorry. I should never have said the things I did about you—about your family.”

  “Stop apologizing, Amy.”

  He held the door for me. “You want me to walk you home?”

  “I don’t know. That didn’t work out so well for you last time.” We both laughed in a forced kind of way.

  He let the door shut behind him. The noise of insects buzzed in the night air. I studied his feet. He desperately needed new shoes; how insane to fall in love with a man who couldn’t even afford shoes.

  “I hate good-byes,” he said, all of a sudden awkward.

  So stay, I thought.

  I said, “So, let’s just say ‘I’ll see you around.’ ”

  He leaned in closer. He lifted my chin to his face and kissed me, a gentle kiss, a chill down my spine. His hand lingered a moment on my cheek.

  “See you around, Amy Gallagher.”

  With a definitive click, the bolt latch locked behind him.

  24

  Eli left.

  To the last minute, I held out hope he would come to the apartment to say good-bye, but he disappeared from Copenhagen as unobtrusively as he’d appeared. I went to The Brewery Saturday, ordered coffee and sat at the bar reliving our last conversation, stunned by the permanence of his absence.

  My only consolation was that Zoë had finally committed to a plane ticket. She would arrive Monday, and her return was the only thing that made Eli’s leaving bearable. She had not stipulated how long she planned to stay in town, but there was never any talk of her moving out and both our names were on the summer lease. I washed her bedsheets and stocked the fridge with nonfat yogurts and organic spinach. At Wal-Mart I bought a cartful of cleaning supplies, intent on scrubbing the apartment from ceiling to floor, on distracting myself from the terrible loneliness that threatened to ruin the long summer vacation hours I usually enjoyed alone.

  Grandma called while I was in the home-goods aisle comparing prices for Swiffer mops.

  “I wanted to talk to you,” she said.

  “About?”

  “Let’s talk in person. How about dinner?”

  She drove up that evening. The limited list of Copenhagen eateries did not impress her, so we went half an hour out of town to an Italian place she and Grandpa had frequented before his doctor outlawed complex carbohydrates (“complicated carbohydrates” as she and Mom called them). I ordered what I wanted without attention to price. Grandma hated to treat cheap people.

  “So what did you want to talk about?” I asked, unfolding the cloth napkin in my lap.

  “Your father had an affair,” she said without prelude. “Two actually.”

  I blinked in shock. “What?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know any other way to say it but to say it.”

  I stared at my grandmother, trying to get my bearings. “Mom said they loved each other but couldn’t live together.”

  “She told me the same thing, until you were both in high school. Eat your soup, Sugarpie. It’s getting cold.”

  I stirred the soup, but I’d suddenly lost my appetite.

  Grandma cut her salad, cross-hatching with her knife until the lettuce had been reduced to a pulp. Her earrings—big orange O’s— dangled as she worked. “Amy, I know this comes as a surprise. I never thought I’d be the one to tell you.”

  At the sight of my confusion, she sighed. She set her silverware down, dabbed either corner of her mouth with her napkin, and explained: “I never knew about his cheating. She told me the same thing she told you, that they loved each other, but couldn’t live together. Of course, that wasn’t enough for me. You love someone, you make it work, that was always my theory. The Lord knows I couldn’t live with your grandfather sometimes, but a
s I saw it, that wasn’t reason enough to throw in the towel. It was all I could do to hold my tongue around your mother those weeks. The divorce was quick. Over. Just like that.

  “Then, years later, there was an incident at church—I don’t know if you remember. A choir member committed adultery with the music director. Rumors about the affair circulated for months. Your mom was so bothered by it; I couldn’t figure it out. Then she came to the house one day, all shook up and crying, and she finally told me the truth about what happened between her and your father.”

  “He cheated on her,” I repeated in disbelief.

  “He had his first affair the second year they were married and the second several months before the divorce. Your mother said she could only guess at the first, but she found letters the second woman had written to your father, and caught them talking on the phone on more than one occasion. She never actually saw them together, thank heavens, but the letters broke her heart. When she confronted him, he said he’d end things, but that wasn’t enough for your mother. She said she couldn’t live her life wondering when he was going to do it again.

  “Your mother left your father, Amy. Not the other way around.”

  My breath felt shallow. Why had Mom lied to me?

  “You know you can’t tell this to a soul,” Grandma warned. “Especially not to your mother. She’s wanted to tell you, but she doesn’t know how.” Careful to keep the billowy sleeves of her hot pink blouse from dipping into her salad, she reached across the table for the salt. “She has this featherbrained idea that she should wait until some big defining moment—first it was your high school graduation. Then it was your college graduation. Now she’s decided it would be best to wait and tell you before you get married.”

  “Did she tell Brian?”

  “Of course not. This whole ‘waiting for the right moment’ is nonsense.”

  “I just don’t understand why she would lie to me.”

  “I have my theories. To admit he cheated is to admit she wasn’t good enough. I think she decided having a husband up and leave his family for no good reason was preferable to living with a husband who had a wandering eye. So she told everyone he left her. And that’s the story she tells herself.”

  Grandma contemplated the striped wallpaper to the side of our booth.

  She said, “I for one would rather be a widow than know my husband preferred another woman.”

  At home I ran to my room. I reached under the bed for the shoe box I kept hidden beside the box of old manuscripts (which, I remembered with annoyance, Eli had never returned) and behind the Tupperware of off-season clothes. Inside were carefully organized piles of photos I’d rescued one at a time from Mother’s burial of all things that reminded her of my father. I studied the latest photograph I’d salvaged, the picture of our summer vacation in Austin that I’d taken from the attic at Christmas. I held it up to my face until the colors of my father’s face blurred. He almost looked happy.

  I cleaned the apartment in a silent rage. I swept and mopped the hardwood floors, scoured the scum from the bathtub with scalding water, worked the dust motes and dried spaghetti sticks out from beneath the refrigerator. I needed to feel the hatred for my father in my arms. I wanted to feel it as a pain in my back. Standing on the bathtub ledge to clean the shower head, my hand on the curtain rod for balance, I slipped and fell, taking the shower curtain with me. I cussed at the curtain, threw it into the bathtub, and hobbled to my bed, my butt and thigh throbbing.

  I slept fitfully, feverish with bizarre dreams. At four in the morning I gave up on sleep. In front of Zoë’s vanity mirror, I pulled down my pants to examine the purple bruise blooming across the back of my thigh.

  “That’s going to be there a while,” I said.

  As a child I’d sometimes wondered what it would be like if a body could survive even if it lost the ability to repair damaged tissue. What if every scratch, bruise, and abrasion remained, a permanent blemish, an unrelenting pain? The mental pictures I’d entertained were horrific: men and women zombies by the age of twenty, skin tattered as old clothes, broken limbs forever askew. Aging would be nothing more than a series of unfortunate, ever debilitating accidents and the fully grown adult a grotesque.

  It was a silly horror I invented to flip my own switches, to set my pulse pounding quick with dread. I might not have been so casual with my fears had I known there was some legitimacy to the nightmare. For what were adults if not an accumulation of internal injuries still festering? What were our bitter memories if not wounds still bleeding?

  I stared into the open fridge, then out the kitchen window, then at my laptop. And as I sat waiting for my laptop to give me an answer, the story began to write itself.

  Linda wakes up one morning to find a form letter in the mail. It reads:

  Dear Wife:

  THANK YOU for your submission to Mr. Charles Andrew Plumb. We find, however, that you do not meet his current needs. We wish you the best of luck placing yourself elsewhere.

  Sincerely,

  The Proxies

  Linda folds the letter and places it back in the envelope. She glances across the street. Her neighbor, Mrs. Alconbury, is pulling weeds with the same cool, calculated vigor with which she gossips at prayer meetings. She makes a visor of her hand and waves to Linda, who forces herself to smile while waving back.

  Inside, Linda goes to her bedroom, locks the door, and lowers herself slowly to her knees. She pulls the shoe box from beneath the bed. She is forty-two. She has been stowing secrets under this bed since sixteen, but it’s getting harder on her body. Gingerly, she stands, sets the box on her dresser, and gently lifts its lid. She lays the new rejection on top of the others that have been tied together with white string.

  Linda, maiden name Pendigrass, has been rejected twentyseven times: by three husbands, ten one-night stands, and fourteen boyfriends. Charles’s letter is her twenty-eighth. She keeps the form letters the men have sent in a manila envelope stashed under her bed. In a college-ruled notebook she painstakingly records the date each relationship began and the date each form letter arrived to terminate it. She prefers the delicate blue lines and skinny white spaces of the college-ruled paper. She has never been to college. Writing on college-ruled paper gives her a feeling of accomplishment.

  Linda can recite the contents of each rejection. Her work was unsuitable, as were her dimpled thighs and deflated breasts. Or the grievances were confined to trivialities stored in secret against her: that she sometimes left her fingernail clippings on the bathroom sink or confused continents with nations. One husband rejected her because she failed to provide adequate meals at an appropriate time. Another because she failed to perform adequately in bed: there were things even she would not subject herself to.

  Linda numbers the twenty-eighth line of her notebook pad and records this, her latest rejection, from Mr. Charles Andrew Plumb, who did not even deem it worthy of his time to outline the specific reasons for his rejection. Somehow, the form letter’s generalized complaint is more wounding than the specific critiques made by previous lovers. Without specific reason for his departure, she feels it is not one particular habit or physical trait or personal flaw that he cannot stand, but rather her whole person that he abhors. Such comprehensive rejection makes her weak in the knees with grief.

  Seven pages in, I stopped, unsure of how to end. Pencil lines of pink dawn seeped through the window blinds.

  I went to the roof to watch the sunrise, carrying the shoe box of photographs with me. There was the yellowed picture of my first birthday, me sitting on my father’s left knee while he balanced the two-tiered chocolate cake he’d made for the occasion on the right. The first day of kindergarten, the last day of summer camp. Both of us on either sides of my bike the day he taught me to ride without training wheels. Two envelopes of pictures, barely enough for one album—never enough for a lifetime.

  A cool wind blew. The leaves of the maple tree slapped against one another, like a hundred decks of c
ards flap-flapping as they shuffled. I loved our tree. It reminded me of the old gnarled oak that grew in my backyard as a child, its delicately veined leaves good for catching my attic daydreams, its limbs strong for climbing. I could feel, vividly, where the bark left abrasions, skin flicked back in thin strips like ash.

  One particular summer day would always be with me. I was six and four months old as I would proudly inform anyone who asked. I could smell the funk of picked dandelion stems on my palms and, on the air, burning charcoals from the grill. We were hosting a picnic. All the Karrows had come. I was wearing my favorite jumper, the one with five pockets in front, two in back, every one of them stuffed with treasures: my one-dollar allowance money, worn soft as silk from its long-term investment in my pocket; two marble-colored rubber balls that sparkled; one flattened specimen of Bazooka bubble gum I was saving for a special occasion; and a fistful of tart red berries picked from the front lawn bushes and intended for Uncle Lynn’s balding head. I was sweating and hungry, but I climbed without slipping, even though dizzy from the height. I had climbed the tree a dozen times before but never this far up. I didn’t know what was goading me, but I felt a terrible urgency to find the top. When I reached the highest weight-bearing limb, I stood on its bending arm and shouted “He-ey!” to everyone below. A crowd collected. I heard a boy—probably the one who told me I couldn’t do it—telling his friend that he’d been to the top of much higher trees, and I heard my mother shouting at me to get down, and my grandmother crying out “Lord, have mercy” while she held her heart in her chest. They appealed to my father who was happily grilling and whistling and blithely unaware. He turned, he looked, he spotted me three stories up. Then he threw back his head and laughed. He was impressed by my achievement. He would no doubt brag about it at the next family event. I grinned. With only one hand pressed against the trunk for balance, I bowed, little histrionic creature that I was, and then shimmied back down, swinging faster and faster, imagining myself an Olympian gymnast windmilling her body effortlessly around the parallel bars, building momentum for the final landing! But of course I didn’t land. I fell, the wind flying out of my chest so fast and hard I felt momentarily breathless and deaf from the shock. There, floating over me, was my father’s face. “Amy, Amy,” he said, shaking his head, carrying me into the house. “Amy, my little battering ram …”